News-specific crawl errors

In order to view error reports specific to Google News, news publishers need to include their site in Google News, have created a Webmaster Tools account and added their site to it. Please contact us to request inclusion in Google News. Once this is done, follow the steps below:

On the Home page, click the site's URL.

On the Dashboard, click Crawl > Crawl Errors.

Click on the News tab to see crawl errors for your news content.

Crawl errors are organized into categories, such as "Article extraction " or "Title error." Clicking on one of these categories will display a list of affected URLs and the crawl errors they're generating.

Explanation

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page is too small when compared to other clusters of text without links on the page. This applies to most pages that contain news briefs or multimedia content, rather than full news articles. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text.

Recommendations

This problem is often caused by:

Too many snippets for related articles - to help our extractor please consider making these snippets clickable.

Features such as 'Send this article to friends' with long descriptions - consider setting a "display:none" or "visibility:hidden" style to make the text invisible or writing the pieces of HTML code by JavasScript dynamically.

User comments - consider enclosing the comments in an iframe, dynamically fetching them with AJAX or moving them to an adjacent page.

Explanation

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to consist of isolated sentences not grouped together into paragraphs. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text.

Recommendations

Check that your paragraphs are formatted such that each is more than one sentence in length.

Make sure your sentences are well punctuated.

Make sure you don't use frequent <br> and <p> tags within your paragraphs, and try to avoid breaking up the article body in general.

Explanation

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to be too long to be a news article. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text. Common causes include news articles that contain user-contributed comments below the article, or HTML layouts that contain other material besides the news article itself.

Recommendations

Consider removing some of the non-article text from the article page. If the article page contains user comments, consider one of the following options:

Explanation

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to contain too few words to be a news article. This applies to most pages that contain news briefs or multimedia content, rather than full news articles. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text.

Recommendations

Try formatting your articles into text paragraphs of a few sentences each. If the article content appears to contain too few words to be a news article, we won't be able to include it.

Explanation

Recommendations

Place a clear date and time for each of your articles in between the article's title and the article's text in a separate line of HTML. The date should specify when the article was first published.

Remove any other dates from the HTML of the article page so that the crawler doesn't mistake them for the correct publication time.

If you'd like to use a date metatag, please contact us first. Date meta tags should be of the form: <meta name="DC.date.issued" content="YYYY-MM-DD">, where the date is in W3C format, using either the "complete date" (YYYY-MM-DD) format, or the "complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds" (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD) format with a time zone suffix.

Create a News Sitemap. The <publication_date> tag will ensure we're able to pick the correct date for your articles.

Explanation

We were unable to extract the article from the page. Extractions fail when we are unable to identify a valid title, body, and timestamp for the article. We list URLs with this error to provide you with information regarding why some articles may not appear in Google News.

Recommendations

Make sure that your title, body, and timestamp are easily crawlable (are available as text and not as images, for instance), but at this time, this error is primarily for informational purposes. We are actively working to improve our extraction methods so that you'll see this error less often.

Explanation

The HTML page contains a date <meta> tag that we were unable to parse.

Recommendations

Date <meta> tags should be of the form: <meta name="DC.date.issued" content="YYYY-MM-DD">, where the date is in W3C format (http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime), using either the "complete date" (YYYY-MM-DD) or "complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds" (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss) format, with optional fraction and time zone suffixes. The date should specify when the article was first published.

Explanation

Googlebot-News didn't find any links to valid news articles on the page. This error applies only to news section pages.

Recommendations

Make sure your article URLs contain at least a 3-digit number as specified in the following guidelines. Otherwise, consider submitting your articles through a News Sitemap.

Make sure your articles are located within the domain of the site included in Google News.

Check the page that generated the error and make sure it includes crawlable links to news articles. Googlebot-News is best able to crawl HTML links and is unable to crawl image links or linked embedded in JavaScript. See our Webmaster Guidelines and tips for creating a Google-friendly site for information on how to ensure your links are crawlable.

Explanation

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears not to contain punctuated sequences of contiguous words. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect section of text.

Recommendations

If the article content doesn't have punctuated sequences of contiguous words, we won't be able to include it in Google News. Make sure that the text of your articles is made up of sentences, and that you don't use frequent <br> or <p> tags within your paragraphs.

Make sure that the full text of each of your articles is available in the source code of your article pages (and not embedded in a JavaScript file, for example).

Make sure the links to your articles lead directly to your articles pages rather than to an intermediate page using a JavaScript redirect.

Explanation

Recommendations

Explanation

The title that we extracted from the HTML page suggests that it is not a news article.

Recommendations

Often this problem can be fixed by setting the <title> tag on the HTML page to the title of the article, and repeating the title in a prominent place on the HTML page, such as in an <h1> tag. Read more about titles.

Recommendations

Explanation

The page had an HTTP content-type that is not supported by Google News.

Recommendations

Articles must have a content-type of text/html, text/plain or application/xhtml+xml.

Google News Sitemaps are best structured as a small, fixed set. When you publish new articles, please update your existing Sitemaps, rather than creating a new Sitemap for them. Frequent creation of new Sitemaps, e.g., one for each calendar day, is not recommended.

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